How the Pandemic Impacted the Roma Community
Roma-led Scottish charity, Ando Glaso, has produced a report examining the experience of Scotland’s Roma community during the Covid-19 pandemic. The report is the first of its kind and highlights the specific difficulties and challenges that Covid-19 has presented to this community
Marianna (left) and Dana (right) delivering food parcels in Govanhill
Covid-19 has had disparate effects on different communities and groups both within and outwith Scotland. In the first report of its kind, Ando Glaso has examined the specific ways in which the pandemic has impacted Scotland’s Roma population. Ando Glaso’s research offers an insight into how the disease itself and the societal changes that have accompanied it have impacted this community.
While the full report goes into further detail, it concludes:
“Family was by far the most mentioned topic throughout the interviews across all four nations and across all ages and genders. The pandemic generated a great amount of fear from losing a family member and from transmitting the virus to other family members... In this context, it can be argued that the crisis had an immense impact on Roma, especially their mental health, because it triggered worries about family and… anxieties and depression in many interviewed individuals. This impact will, no doubt, be felt for months to come and signifies how seriously Roma took the crisis and did all they could to protect themselves and people around them, especially their loved ones.”
Researchers also detailed a number of specific topical findings which include the following:
Stigmatisation: Media reporting on the Roma not practicing social distancing add to the Roma being seen as part of the problem and a risk, rather than seeing the Roma as being at increased and disproportional risk of actually catching the illness (increased spread amongst the Roma community due to mistrust of information coming form official channels and increased buy into disinformation) and developing complications from it.
Roma culture: The pandemic had a devastating effect on the Roma culture and the culture became disproportionately and significantly affected by the lockdown because the culture is based on gathering.
Education: Low education levels due to racism = increased risk of uncritical thinking = increased sensitivity to conspiracy theories = increased disinformation amongst the Roma community = increased spread of Covid 19 amongst the Roma community = increased impact of the pandemic (death, long covid etc) adding to the biological disadvantage.
Elderly: People that would be commonly de- scribed as elderly in the Roma communities had on one side memories of similar “catastrophic” events in the past. This knowledge helped them to overcome this crisis as they knew that there was light at the end of the tunnel. However, because their families are split between countries (of origin and Scotland), they were anxious that they might die before they saw their families (and their families see them) again.
Vaccination: A massive resistance to vaccination in general in Slovakia means that many Slovak Roma will not get vaccinated as they watch news from home which also trickles into their social media channels. The Scottish Roma will not benefit equally from the successful vaccination campaign in Scotland because of the Slovak media influence. Similar applies to Romanian, Czech and Polish Roma, but is most prominent amongst the Slovak Roma.
Below, one of the report’s authors, Eva Kourova, explains more:
Why is this report needed?
Because Roma too, watched in disbelief and because they too, were hit by the severity of the situation, but their voice was not heard, their anguish unseen. We want to remedy some of this and make the experience of Roma visible and put on record the immediate impact, which is still very much alive in the minds of those that went through it.
March 2020 was the time when the severity of the situation sank in and started dismantling what was to date considered a normal everyday life. We bring forth a witness statement from the “front line” of this pandemic and share with others how disproportionate exposure to the virus combined with lockdown restrictions and the long-term impact effects of racism affected the Roma families.
Read more: Govanhill's Roma Helping Others Through the Pandemic
This introductory community action research project collects data on the impact of the pandemic including how lockdown has impacted lives in relation to local Roma communities in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. This work is a new territory for us and required us to contract a short-term academic analyst who has experience of working within disadvantaged communities, particularly Roma communities. We believe this diversion from our usual work is important as local Roma communities have the right to have their voices heard at this time and make their experience known as valued members of our society.
We consider this work to be a matter of urgency, something that has to be documented before the “new normal” sets in and before decisions are made by policy makers on how long-term recovery for communities is handled. And perhaps most importantly before we forget, before we shrug off these difficulties which people felt they had no power to control or prevent. This way we will be strategically putting in place evidence of what has happened so that history can’t be re-written through one narrow, exclusive point of view, as it happened in the past.
What does this report do?
For centuries Roma have been abandoned by policies, disproportionately targeted by state-security systems and served as scapegoats to all sorts of societies’ ills. It appears that this history of marginalisation has been no different throughout this pandemic as Mihai Calin Bica, a Roma practitioner in the UK stated. He said:
“We (understand Roma) have ties of kinship which help us even during times like this. But we also need the government and local authorities to do a lot more than they currently are.”
In his account Roma injustice continues to prevail as families face financial insecurity, a disproportionate risk of infection and reduced access to education and services, which in his view are exaggerated by an increase in discriminatory attitudes in the UK. Here in Glasgow our understanding of Roma’s lived experience is similar, but there is no evidence of it as yet. We want to change that.
There is an assumption that the West is better for the Roma than the East of Europe. It is for this reason that Open Society Foundations recently published a briefing paper called ‘Roma in the COVID-19 Crisis’ which excludes the UK and only includes countries in Europe where the Roma situation was expected to be affected the most because of this pandemic, countries such as Italy, Spain and the Balkan countries.
There is a risk that the Scottish Roma voice will not be included in debates about future post-Covid justice. We fully support what the briefing paper proposes: “EU institutions should centrally allocate and manage targeted funds for Roma communities across Europe, in partnership with Roma advocates and Roma-led organisations.” We offer to contribute towards this vision which includes Scotland, a place of residency to many East European Roma who should be included in this plan. In addition to the immediate report made by The Open Society Foundation, we offer an evaluation of the impact of Covid in Scotland on individuals and families through the eyes of the Roma, a year on.
What do the report’s conclusions reveal?
The purpose of this research was to bring forth the lived realities of Roma in Scotland during the pandemic because they, too, were hit by the severity of the situation, but their voice was not heard and their anguish remains largely unseen. Racialisations took place at the beginning of the pandemic which spread rumours that Roma are not practicing social distancing. This at times was generated by local hate speech and fuelled by tabloid media. Our report is to partially remedy this and make the lived experience of the Roma visible.
Through this research, we have put on record the initial impact, which is still well remembered and still continues to affect those that went through it. We did not assume that the Roma would have lived through the pandemic differently and that they would have had different experiences from anyone else in Scotland. The purpose of this research was to record the impact of Covid crisis on the Scottish communities, so that someone else sometime in the future won’t be able to produce alternative realities for the Roma to fit a political agenda. However, as we went along with the data analysis, we realised that the crisis indeed affected the Roma community differently.
The Roma as BAME are statistically at increased risk of developing Covid 19 complications. This means that they already entered Covid from a disadvantageous starting point. Adding to this, we found some possible traces of disadvantage that would be worth looking into in more detail. They can be found in the research conclusions section and include, amongst others, topics such as education, employment, poverty, personal freedoms and stigmatisation.